An Incomplete Directory of Open Standards

Through this open world I’m about to ramble,
Through ice and snows, sleet and rain,
I’m about to ride that mornin’ railroad,
P’raps I’ll die on that train.
- MAN OF CONSTANT SORROW

During the panel discussion at the recent British Computer Society Open Source event, there was discussion (and confusion) about Open Source versus Open Standards. I was asked “So, can you give us some examples of Open Standards”. I rattled off a few, but I thought I’d add a few more here. There is a lot more to be said on the topic, but a good place to start is to list the standards that I think are important.

If I get the time, I plan to turn this into a nice diagram that is much more easily digestible. If there are important standards that I’ve forgotten about that anyone interested in web sites should know about, please let me know in the comments. I’d avoided worrying about file formats (e.g. PNG, MPEG, PDF). And REST isn’t a standard – it is an architectural style that was developed in parallel with the HTTP/1.1 protocol. I’m sure there are many many important ones I’ve left out though.

This is a long and boring post with a record-breaking number of acronyms. So maybe you should stop reading now.

The Internet Plumbing

These standards are the plumbing of the Internet. Like the sewers under a big city, they are impossible to change and will be there forever. They’re infrastructure. Some people are saying Twitter has already become infrastructure, but I’m not convinced about that yet. These standards are split into layers – the link layer is about physical connection to a network and include standards such as Ethernet. The Internet layer routes packets of information across one or more network using the Internet protocol (IP). The Transport Layer is responsible for the reliable delivery of messages, and uses standards such as TCP or UDP. Finally, the Application Layer provides higher level application specific protocols such as DNS, HTTP (and WebDAV) for web servers, FTP, SMTP for mail servers, NTP for time servers, LDAP for user directories and so on. But I’m not here to talk about any of these. I want to talk about the standards that sit on top of these, specifically for web pages.

Making Web Pages

First 10 Years of the W3C - Click for large version

Let’s start with the standards we know and love that make up web pages. Of course we have HTML 4, XHTML and the eagerly awaited HTML 5. We make our HTML pretty using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and we interact with the page using the Document Object Model (DOM), which has a large number of associated standards. Note AJAX is not a standard, despite what you might hear. The XMLHttpRequest DOM API (which can be used to implement AJAX) is currently a last call working draft and may be a W3C standard soon. Another client side standard, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) never really took off and probably never will.

OASIS standards

All of the standards mentioned so far are open, and unless otherwise stated, are looked after by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). These guys look after the Web as we know it. However, there are other standards bodies that create open standards that are more application specific, and some bodies that create standards which might not be considered truly open. Below are some of the important ones.

OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), in their own words, “drives the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society”. The OASIS standards that touch my world include, in no particular order:

Authentication and Private Data Portability

OASIS tends to focus on fairly large, complex standards which are always at risk from smaller standards which are often easier to implement so have less of a barrier to adoption. The standards that I think will beat SAML include OpenID which has taken the web by storm recently and OAuth. OpenID (under the OpenID Foundation) is a web single sign-on protocol similar to SAML. OAuth (now under the IETF) allows a site to request private user data from another site. Both OpenID and OAuth above rely of XRDS. While we’re talking about users and social networks, other important not-quite-standards are listed below. A great article to learn more about these is the “Overlap of identity technologies” worked example from Google.

OpenSocial (Google) – for building social applications (widgets) and share data across networks

Friend of a Friend (FOAF) – defines an open technology for connecting social Web sites and the people in them. It uses RDF and OWL.

Another open content repository standard is the Java Content Repository (JCR) from the Java Community Process (JCP) Programme. Now while these standards are Java language focussed, they are still open. JCP standards are defined in Java Specification Requests (JSRs), of which there are other 300. Some important, well adopted JCP standards include:

Syndication

For syndication we have RSS, which is looked after by the RSS Advisory Board (the guy that fixes my boiler is on it) and AtomPub, which is an IETF standard. An extension to these, PubSubHubbub, is a Google project which added near-realtime notification to RSS and AtomPub. My boiler guy thinks this specification has holes. For outlines, we have OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language). For example, here is my blogroll as OPML.

Things that start with Open

I thought I’d end with some things I like that aren’t actually standards, but use the word Open in their title.

OpenSearch – A set of formats designed to make sharing search results easier

OpenStreetMap – Creates and provides free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them. This is more about Open Data than Open Standards, but anyway.

OpenCalais- A service that semantically parses your content and identifies people, events, places and more. I used the WordPress plugin Tagaroo on this blog for fun. Only basic use is free, though. Probably doesn’t really belong here. However, below is a screenshot that shows Tagaroo suggesting tags and images for this blog post. The power of semantic analysis.

So many standards, so much confusion.
It seems to me that in general proprietary vendors does just a good job of standards compliance compared to open source vendors. I know that Microsoft has not been great historically, but IBM and Oracle seems to do well with most if not all of the above.

Yes there are a lot of standards…. but in my opinion few of them actually help you in delivering an actual CMS project. Most of them are to do with getting data in and out of a system (SQL, CMIS), or the way in which the data is presented to the end user (HTML, XML, CSS).

If you need to implement a specific piece of functionality that your proprietary CMS system does not support then you can yell ‘Open Standards’ until you are blue in the face. If there isn’t an API that allows you to do what you want to do, or the vendor does not support (or want to support) what it is you want to do then you are out of luck. Simple as that.

So, yes I agree that Open Standards are a must, and are IMHO a *minimum* needed, but I don’t think they can encompass the whole benefit in terms of flexibility, transparency, and balance of power between vendor and client you get from Open Source.

First – thanks for mentioning Tagaroo – and a brief clarification on usage. You can use it as much as you want – for commercial or non-commercial blogs – up to 50,000 times per day (that’s a lot of posts). It works on top of the OpenCalais service which has the same usage rules.

For those 50,000 transactions you get the full OpenCalais capability – not some dumbed down version. Above 50,000 per day and we’d like to have a discussion on some flavor of value exchange.

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